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monoson Meditation Becomes Beneficial Surprisingly Fast

    > It doesn't develop the mind, it dissolves the mind. Self-improvement? 
    > Forget it, baby. It erases the self. 
   > Throws the ego out on its big brittle ass.

This doesn't sound like it fits the western culture at all. I'd think twice about going down a path that is so fundemantally different from what we've learned since kindergarden.

monoson RingoJS vs NodeJS

why downvotes? he - again - clearly states his intentions. what's wrong with that.

monoson RingoJS vs NodeJS

clearly points out several advantages, so i think it qualifies as comparison.

  * commonjs conformant
  * mature & stable
  * java access
  * ...

i agree: dislike of nodejs shines through, but that was clear after the first paragraph. hard to talk about ssjs without mentioning node, nowadays.

monoson App Engine JavaScript SDK

the thing about rhino is, that it already is a mature js implementation. it has the most modern js support of all the engines out there (the version shipping with java is sadly quiet old) and it's battle tested. we have it in production since 8+ years.

i can see how it might seem rhino has "little active development" because we are comparing it to js implementations that just started and of course have more "going on" then the old horse.

monoson The 1000 most-visited sites on the web (by Google)

"...as measured by Ad Planner."

the list is a decent guesstimate. unless every single site on the planet uses the facebook like button, google analytics, google ads, or something else that tracks globally, there is now way to correctly measure UC or PI.

monoson What is Computer Science?

about the difference between computer science and informatik (UK/US vs europa):

as others have noted: in europe "computer science" is not taught at universities. informatik is. (one could argue wether the courses "fachhochschulen" offer teach "computer science").

reading what lectures in computer science (in the US) are about, it seems "computer science" is really a lot about computers and writing software. whereas informatics ("informatiker") do not necessarly work with computers - often they do, because computers are handy for working with information. but the computer itself, its software & hardware, how it works is not a part of all informatik studies (it is of some).

i'm no native english speaker but from what wikipedia tells me "informatics" - this very broad field - is actually what we mean with "informatik". for example at the technical university of vienna there are eight different, specific sub-disciplines you can do your master's degree in ("media informatics", "medical informatics", "software informatiks", "technical informatiks", "computer graphics" - my own translations, sorry).

monoson CommonJS effort sets JavaScript on path for world domination

as a commenter below me pointed out, there is node.js which got some attention recently.

there was a rather long concurrency discussion on commonjs http://groups.google.com/group/commonjs/browse_thread/thread...

there was no consensus and the topic was delayed for later discussion - but it seemed the promises idea got most attention (my pov) http://wiki.commonjs.org/wiki/Promises

monoson Tarsnap - Why is 1 GB 10^9 bytes instead of 2^30?

ops, yes of course

monoson Tarsnap - Why is 1 GB 10^9 bytes instead of 2^30?

10^9 = german billion. no problem here with the short ladder.

monoson Feynman, Challenger Disaster, and Software Engineering

fun fact about the challenger disaster. letting it launch at all was clearly an infovis fail, as tufte explains:

http://www.asktog.com/books/challengerExerpt.html

(i guess a lot went wrong)

monoson What we actually know about software development, and why we believe it’s true

regarding problems and engineering, lets see how brooks puts it:

"Essential complexity is caused by the problem to be solved, and nothing can remove it"

so the kind of complexity with have to tackle comes from the area of application we are in, not the programming task itself. its not about writing pretty, bugfree java code. let's assume your java is 100% perfect. there still remains the essential complexity of the problem.

now if the problem is in any way related to humans (a lot of software has to be 'a solution' for humans) then there is no way to proof a solution to be The Right One. hence B/B testing. this is at some stages the way to got.

show something & get feedback from the user, who knows more about the problem (himself) than you. this of course doesn't mean it's all blind trial&error - well in a way it is, but humans get better at that over time.

disclaimer: if you program the fuel-control for a rocket that is 30 years old, you can of course calculate the correct solution and resolve all essential complexity to mathematical formulas.

interestingly this was not the case for the first rocket-programmers, since the rockets kept changing every few month :)

monoson Let 5 = 6

i dont know much haskell, but "variable assignment" is not the first thing that comes to mind if i think of functional programming.

monoson Coding Horror: Treating User Myopia

the problem with replacing backslash with <br/> is that there are also the kind of users that make to much carriage returns whenever they feel a sentence is finished.

this turns out to be just as ugly.

how do you get to the 99%?? i would say there are more people pressing ENTER when they really want a line-wrap then people writing textwalls.

monoson Coding Horror: Treating User Myopia

correct usage of carriage return and spaces are hard to get right for users who are not used to type writing.

thats about it. teach them that and you get 80% readable ascii.

monoson Guido's Proposal: Moratorium on Python language changes

thx for clarifying this. still a strange example since the GIL is not thought to be a problem, from what i read on pydev.

monoson Guido's Proposal: Moratorium on Python language changes

  > if someone came up with (otherwise acceptable)
  > changes to get rid of the GIL I wouldn't object.

that was the big news for me.

monoson How Wall Street is making its billions

this is probably trivial economics but it always eluded me:

when the govt is giving out amount X money, and wants amount X + INTERESTX back. how can that work? where should INTERESTX come from when they only gave us X?

monoson Spud, potato powered web server

good job. had to read it all :)

  > It has been heavily optimized for speed, in order to get
  > the response time below TCP's default retransmission timeout.

monoson Wt: A C++ web toolkit

very ambitious.

from what i get from the examples (see e.g. hello world [1]) and the wiki, it abstracts away all html, javascript and css. you can stay in C++ if you want.

i can imagine the html interface could work for a desktopy-application on a portable device, where the server is localhost.

but i can't image doing a web20-y app with this. the CSS/JS is hidden away so deep and both are moving targets with current browser affairs.

[1] http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt#/src/hello

monoson C++ in Coders at Work

> C accurately models how the computer actually works

i don't even know on what kind of hardware my java or python programs run. neither google (appengine) nor our IT apartment tell me.

so for most app developers "a computer" is not really something they work with. of course someone must write those abstractions (python, etc), and they do it in C/C++ :)

monoson Why do we use checks?

> giro transfer

that's what we do in EU. never wrote a single check. i'm 28.

monoson Ask HN: Please name two of your most favorite books.

Ha Shu'al B'Lool Hatarnagolot - Ephraim Kishon. funny from page one & my first contact with the strange world, rules and absurdities of political systems (couldn't find the english title, sorry)

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering - Fred Brooks. introduced the concept of an essays to me, and that the software wolrd is really as strange as i always felt

of my favorite books, those are probably the two best fitting into HN, since they enlighten in some way :)

monoson Illegal Downloads 150x More Profitable Than Legal Sales

i'm not saying they do that, but one could:

  * buy cheap copyright like 1940s movies
  * make divx files, name after non-existing pornos
  * anonymously seed to major torrent site
  * startup your auto-legal-threat-software
  * collect money

this might be legal?

monoson JS Wars

it's always a different superset. not too bad, and you always have that with different interpreters / compilers.

monoson How to Write Clearly, Think Clearly, and Learn Easily

me european, had to look up 5-paragraphs essay in wikipedia.

i've heard the basic "introduction, narration, .." - structure in school, but it sounds to me when you say 5para essay you really mean an essay with five paragraphs.

monoson Illegal Downloads 150x More Profitable Than Legal Sales

they mainly own copyrights to pornographic movies. i guess that helps with the "no questions asked" part. i got such a letter myself, but ISPs in europe don't have to give out personal data unless the request comes from a judge.

monoson Illegal Downloads 150x More Profitable Than Legal Sales

yes, it's better for DigiRights since they sell the software that will help you track down the law-breakers.

monoson Illegal Downloads 150x More Profitable Than Legal Sales

DigiRights "developed" the technology to automate those "requests for damages" letters, so they are marketing it as being very profitable - no big surprise.

DigiRights, the company making those claims is highly suspicious. my parents actually got a letter from them. well their ISP got the letter wrote to my parents something like "digirights says you downloaded XYZ (porno movie). we didn't tell DigiRiths who you are, but please: stop it."

i doubt DigiRights is acting legally in austria, where i live. this is currently being viewed at.

monoson JS Wars

  >light-years to go before it's a viable platform
  >for anything involving animation and graphics

once all browsers support the canvas element (as does firefox3) its just a matter of time until some standard 2D animation libraries popup that will enable game development.

flash is ecmascript + proprietary set of libraries and a great IDE. but javascript has the advantage of coming out-of-the-box with the browser.

(and in the distant future there is Canvas 3D, which really is opengl exposed to JS :) https://wiki.mozilla.org/Canvas:3D )

monoson JavaScript Programming Patterns

http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/bikeshedding.html

wether we should call it thisObj or self :)